So I went to the library today and got a lot of reading done. For anyone that is interested, I particularly have to recommend Rabelais’s writings (I read part of Pantagruel), which combine wit, farce, and even (to us) immature humor in such a playful and smart way – they’re pure laughter, holding nothing reverent, but because they doesn’t hold themselves reverent either (except jokingly), they seem fair. Most other works of the time that try for it (like Marlowe’s Faustus) try and fail to achieve the same level of laughter. It’s on the level of Chaucer and Shakespeare’s laughter (when they try for it).
Of course, I may only think it’s so great because it’s a relief to actually read it after reading for weeks about Bakhtin praising it. But that’s just a symptom of literary study; sometimes you read more about something than you actually read it, before you read it. Which, to me, is silly, but I have to keep up with what’s assigned., and it sometimes helps when I finally see it.
Look at that, I worked myself into a ramble and didn’t even get to where I want.
After I had done my reading, I went to read the newspaper, because there’s no kind of break from reading for class like reading something else. And, like my curiosity about reading people’s papers that are still saved on hard drives in the library and getting a feel for how people actually write (and maybe a bit on how they think), I like reading letters to the editor. And there was one with which I had a great amount of agreement.
The argument was for both of the presidential candidates to respectively present what they are going to do without slinging mud and deriding the other to make a point, because the only point that makes is who not to choose, not who to choose. (An important distinction.) I’m right with the author there. But then he also says that they should drop their rhetoric, such as using terms like reform and change, and only present facts. The sentiment is right – we should understand what the change is doing, what the reform’s actions and results will be, rather than relying on these words in a vague and imprecise manner, riding them as we ride slogans like “Liberty! Fraternity! Equality!” (whoops, that should be in French) or “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”But the attack on rhetoric is futile.
I’m not sure what they meant on rhetoric; it’s a fun word that gets bounced around, and as the Wikipedia entry notes, means a whole lot of different things. Aristotle (again, Wikipedia) treated it as practical reasoning rather than ideal logic. Bakhtin (sorry, had to, I’ve been reading it today) builds on it, referring to it as the way language expresses itself practically , a form well suited to addressing the way life is vibrantly lived, and therefore incorporated with all its livelihood in the novel. He probably means it as the sort of words that get bandied about in debate, words that are meant to convince and that need not have any substance at all, a language of debate. Though I get my perspective from the first two definitions and others, the last definition is the one I’ll argue with, saying, “Well, how can we say anything without rhetoric?”
To say anything meaningful, we have to say it in such a way that it has the ring of truth to it. That’s a function of language. We do it all the time, even when we say we’re nearly out of milk. We don’t (at least I hope) just point at the refrigerator and scream “Miiiiilk!” hoping for the point to present itself. We say, quite simply but to the point, “We’re nearly out of milk,” or a hundred other statements with similar bearings. That comes to us effortlessly, if by effortless we forget that we learned the language.
But once that’s out of the way, think about how “fact” and “opinion” were taught in grade school. I remember lists of sentences to compare. Some would say things like, “The Grand Canyon was fun,” and others would say, “The Empire State Building is very tall.” The first one would be an opinion, not because of any tricky use of rhetoric, but because fun is a personal judgment. The second would be a fact, because anyone can clearly observe that. Both use language to make a point, and want the reader to believe them, want to convince you that they’re right. Are they not, then, both rhetoric?
And so this can be applied to any statement of policy. Of course the candidates will want us to believe it. They seek to convince us. However, they do not have our intrinsic trust, so that what they say as fact, we’re going to check. That’s fine. But they’re still going to want to adorn what they say in such a way that we want to trust it. And so their list, even if forced to be in plain language, will still hold a will to make us think it’s true. To do away with all rhetoric will result in mere gestures and a reliance on the other people to figure it out for themselves, which isn’t communication at all. It would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (or the bacon with the grease, since I’m hungry).
All of this is towards my perfectionist use of rhetoric, which would be to say that it would be better to say that they should leave their rhetoric unspun and uncontentious, plain and unadorned. They should present schematic reasoning (such that we can see the progression of ideas clearly) rather than self-obscuring feats of magical explanation that would make Lord Voldemort glad. Good rhetoric isn’t bad; it’s by practical examples and the good placement of words that truth sings rather than simply plods along. It’s also how lies sing, but in such a case we ought to manage the choir in such a way that they get placed in the back, rather than leaving the church in silence.
